Sarah Hall Hall 1

Mrs. Dorothea Williams-Arnold

1040 AP/IB

6/07/2019

Passion and Responsibility in Society

According to Google passion is “a feeling of intense enthusiasm towards or compelling

desire for someone or something. Passion can range from eager interest in or admiration for an

idea, proposal, or cause; to enthusiastic enjoyment of an interest or activity; to strong attraction,

excitement, or emotion towards a person. In society when citizens have a passion for something

naturally one will do anything to nurture that passion. Passions play a heavy role in society

because they influence what you value and what you enjoy.”

According to Google responsibility is “the opportunity or ability to act independently and

make decisions without authorization. Responsibility in society, also known as social

responsibility, is built on a system of ethics, in which decisions and actions must be ethically

validated before proceeding. If the action/decision causes harm to society or the environment

then it would be considered to be socially irresponsible.”

Moral values must be bestowed among each citizen to create a dividen between right and

wrong. This way fairness among society is viewed (by the majority) to be the right choice, but

more frequently this “fairness” is absent. Every individual has a responsibility to act in a manner

that is beneficial to society as a whole and not just one person.

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Responsibility and passion can be interpreted in a plethora of ways. My overall purpose

is to find out the ways in which citizens prioritize their desires and their responsibilities and how

that affects society holistically. Desires and responsibilities play an enormous role in modern

society, how do citizens distinguish when to choose their responsibilities over their desires and

vice versa and how does that affect society as a whole?

The human experience is comprised of several occasions in which one must decide

between their desires or their morals. As stated in the Stanford Encyclopedia “the existence of

reasons to act depends on the existence of desires possessed by the agent who would act.” in

other words, this means that in order to have a reason to do something one must desire to do

something so that they may act upon it. In essence this is stating that in order to form a reason

you must have a desire. A debate exists discussing relations of desires and reasons to act;

therefore, one’s reason to do something depends on one’s desires, and similarly, one’s reason

to help a fellow human depends on one’s desires. Even though these are similar, these two

arguments have different inferences, as Mark Schroeder argued. Citizens preserved their

view in a plethora of ways, but modern debates have zoomed in on a large part of an

argument explored and created by Bernard Williams. He argues that “only citizens can

explain the relation between reasons and motivation: if one has a reason to act, then one can

act for that reason,” (Williams 3.4) but this is only guaranteed if the person having the reason

to act involves having the desire. Thus, reasons to act thrive on the existence of desires.

Approaching this issue with a holistic view, Mark Schroeder argues that “people simply fit

best with our range of intuitions” (Schroeder 3.4) about what reasons there are to act and the

ways these reasons are or are not unforeseeable facts.

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Moreover, citizens may begin to view things differently one being the freedom of

speech. Some may view it as obscenity and want stricter laws on how and when citizens may

speak and what they may speak upon. “Obscenity is self evidently a matter of ‘expression of

ideas’ as opposed to ‘conduct,’ …”(Finnis 222). This quote illustrates how some citizens,

who are more open minded, to the idea of obscenity being an expression of how one feels

instead of it a threat to society. This poses the question of who is responsible of the

regulation of obscenity and when to stop allowing citizens to express how they feel when

another citizen feels threatened by what another citizen states. This also allows for one to

reflect on themselves and ponder the question of does the desire of expressing themselves

take precedence over their societal responsibility and morals.

Humans will desire what they please but in contrast they have to have a reason for

the desire. “The human will, in contrast, is related to such principle as’ an imperative for a

being whose reason is not the sole determinant of the will’” (Packer 429). Mark Packer in

Kant on Desire and Moral Pleasure suggests in this quote that there may not always be a

reason for every action a citizen possess. In addition this happens very seldom that humans

act without a reason behind the action. Packer is stating that moral good must be defined

correlating with the fact of how your ethics and morals are separate from your desires and

your intentions.

When stating how women elders were majority of the time in control in the

nineteenth century Malayan Society, Michael Peletz was displaying how even in different

clans, lineage, and component segments they all contain and utilize a common factor (the

elderly women). This also may display the society’s desire for the women who have lived
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through a lot and understand how the country has worked. In the book Reason and Passion:

Representations of Gender in a Malay Society, Peletez informs the audience of how gender,

tribe and or clan affects how a person is treated and whether or not they get to make

decisions. This contributes to the topic of passion versus morals because when creating this

government one must choose whether they want to base it on the morals and ethics of the

people in the society or if they would like exclusively create a society for a certain group of

citizens.

Passion and responsibility play ginormous roles in society and affect it tremendously,

depending on how citizens perspectives are. One may view morals greater than their desires

and vice versa. When citizen choose one over the other they are implying that the one they

chose is “better” and must be the correct way. Passion in society is needed for us to grow as a

whole and thrive to have more opportunities. Desire is needed in society for citizens to work

harder and create a strife. This is how passion and responsibility affect society.

Work Cited
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Finnis, John M. “Reason and Passion”:The Constitutional Dialetic of Free Speech and

Obscenity. William S. Hein & Co. (1961); 222 https://heinonline.org

Parker, Mack. Kant on Desire and Morals Pleasure. University of Pennsylvania Press,

vol. 50, no. 3, (Jul. - Sep., 1989), pp. 429-442. Journal of the History of Ideas

Schroeder, M., 2007. Slaves of the Passions, New York: Oxford University Press.

Schroeder, T., 2004. Three Faces of Desire, New York: Oxford University Press.

–––, 2006. “Précis of Three Faces of Desire,” Dialogue, 45: 125–130.

–––, 2006. “Reply to critics,” Dialogue, 45: 165–174.

Michael Smith, XIV—Reason and Desire, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,

Volume 88, Issue 1, 1 June 1988, Pages 243–258, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/88.1.243

Peletz, Michael G. Reason and passion: representations of gender in a Malay society.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Web.. Retrieved from the Library of Congress,

<lccn.loc.gov/94045698>.